1st home of my own

I am soooo excited. Last night at home group, i found out that my offer got accepted. I am so stoked. Today i confirmed finances with the bank and so in about two months time, i'll own little den. I love this place so much. It's just gorgeous - only two bedrooms, but when i manage to save a bit more dough, i will invest in some space saving ideas from IKEA, which will make the place much bigger on the inside ;-)

One of the things i saw a while ago, was a clever furniture arrangement where a double bed was up at the roof and underneath were shelves and a desk. Now that would be handy. I also like the idea of building cupboards high up on the walls near the roof. This place has high ceilings and so that's one way to maximise space. Oh i can't wait.

Unfortunately, the place comes with a tenant on a contract that ends in December. I could actually force this lady out, but she's obviously a single mum and has two kids staying with her. The son (who goes to the uni across the road) , is staying in the spare bedroom, while the mum and her teenage daughter are staying in two single beds perpendicular to eachother in the main bedroom. I remember the days in which my own mum really struggled to raise us three kids as a single mum and i still get to hear her stories every now and then, so my heart is full of compassion for people like that. I think this lady is pretty poor. She is Bhuddist too, which is not that great, but i guess Jesus loves her all thew same and "eveyone needs compassion".

To be honest, moving into the place in the middle of Winter would not be ideal anyway. I think i much prefer a Summer transition into a new residence ;-) Praise God

My first offer

Yesterday i put in my first offer for an apartment. It was such a big decision and much more complicated than i expected because it was a private sale, the guy at the place was from somewhere overseas (so his English was not great) and was not a real estate agent and i had never filled out one of the forms before. I was totally without a clue, bit i fell in love with the place as soon as i walked in the door.

It's a 1930's apartment with high ceilings, picture rails through the lounge, wooden floorboards, hidden cupboards tucked into parts of the wall where you wouldn't expect them, a large main bedroom with an ensuite bathroom, a second bedroom/study and a little courtyard around the side. It is just gorgeous. There are four apartments in the block and the person who lives at the front of the complex bought two apartments and joined them together to form a two-level townhouse. The apartment at the back is a free-standing structure, so it's separated by the parking bars.... so that really just means one neighbour, an older lady. The back apartment is rented to a young chick who is studying at the uni, which is just across the road ... literally! I like the fact that all the student parking bays across the road are only paid parking during weekdays - at night and on weekends, they are free. That means my visitors can find ample parking.

Anyway, i have come to realise that cute little apartments in posh suburbs like this one, get snapped up so quickly. Most are sold by the end of the home opens. Anyway, so i was madly trying to get my act together after taking the form and heading home wiht it. Luckily, i was able to get some great advice from a few people.

I realise though that i stuffed up the dates for confirming finance approval and settlement. I put down Friday, 22 June 2007 and Friday 20 July 2007, respectively. What a duffa - i should have only allocated 14 days to get finance approval. I don't really feel up to speed about the whole process. I guess if my generous offer gets rejected, then it was all just a learning experience! Man, i want the place so much though. I guess I am competing with people who have huge amounts of cash at hand. I guess one day, one of these apartments will have my name on it. Oh please God, can't it be this one!!!

Newly weds

This is my friend Audrey and her new-found hubby, Jason. She was recruited to replace me in a job I had four years ago. We both moved on after about 1.5 years in that job, which is kind of funny.

What a beautiful photo. I think half of the city got married last summer.

My Sister

City Dining

Went to two restaurants last week.

On Thursday, I went to the C Restaurant.
I wasn't particularly impressed with the revolving restaurant. Most of us got the salad entree, which had long, dry and crispy strips of very salty bacon, combined with short, soft, moist, stips of smoked beef, along with some really soggy white cheese and extremely strong vinagrette-flavoured lettuce leaves. It was just way too much flavour. We were screwing our faces up with every mouthful. Bluuurggh. My main meal was fish and chips, which was ok - but it was all really expensive and not very satisfying. Anyway, the whole concept of having a rotating floor seemed very bizarre to me, actually it made me feel a bit dizzy. While the view outside was nice, it was strange watching the inside atmosphere change. At one stage, we went past a speaker in the wall that was blasting out rock music! Then along another part of the wall were five little paintings, including one with a naked woman who had no arms. Des, one of the Manager's, commented that the artist must not have felt a need to paint anything else after they had painted the lady's breasts. Haha, what a crack-up.

Then on Friday, I went to the Seizan Restaurant.

The Japanese restaurant was absolutely lovely, with low-lying tables and waitresses dressed in kimonos. They were so beautiful and elegant to look at. There was no view, but the atmosphere was very inviting, with soft lighting and gentle music. As with all Japanese food, it was immaculately presented. I had terriyaki chicken with tempura, rice, miso and a few other things. It was cheap too, especially in comparisom to the C Restaurant! I'd love to go there again.

On Wednesday next week, i'll be going to another work function at the Old Swan Brewery, which will be awesome. I have never been inside there, but i've caught glimpses of it as i've rollerbladed past on the river side.

Work work work

Have been really busy lately and I feel weirdly run down, despite making a decision to cap my hours to about eight hours a day max. I guess I am still studying outside this time too, but it’s really interesting stuff I’m learning and I don’t blame it on study time. I think I just need some time off work, but my boss wont approve any leave and I have four days worth of hours that built up earlier in the year that I should be entitled to take off. He has this weird idea that people can just work for a long period of time without taking any time off, but then make up for it in one lot of annual leave at the end of the year. I don’t agree. I think people need a day off every now and then, to recharge.

I guess it’s good that he works so hard each day and abides by his own tough regime. I had lunch with a group of people I used to work with yesterday and my friend, Lisa, was telling me how she’s been working really long hours and isn’t allowed to take leave either – but worse still is that her boss takes time off all the time!, so his staff are left to do all the work themselves. That’s pretty mean. The problem is, with our work arrangements we can’t just take time off in their absence either because every bit of leave you take has to be signed off and you only get paid leave entitlements when the HR staff see your signed form.

Lisa was saying that it’s been a really long time since she had time off and she has been ill from stress. She had a car accident five years ago in which she hurt her neck and somehow the pains come back and she had to take five weeks off on sick leave – two of which she spent just lying in bed. She was saying if she had just been allowed some time off, she doesn’t think she would have had to go through that ordeal. I guess the stress of not being allowed to have time off impacts on your health.

Another friend, Jill, was telling me how the Communications Manager in her work place left the organization and, subsequently, she got lumped with all this girl’s work on top of her own duties, simply because she had a public relations degree and had the relevant skills. Jill is the sweetest girl and I guess part of the problem is that she isn’t able to say “no” and then people take advantage of her helpful attitude. For no extra pay, she carried on these additional functions, always expecting them to be taken off her when the position was filled…. but then the organization decided not to fill the position because Jill was doing such a great job. She was working until very late in the evening every day and it eventually took its toll on her health. Actually, she said everything in her life went downhill - her health, her relationships, her social life, etc…. she also had to take a long time off work on sick leave. Thankfully, she has just started a new permanent job elsewhere. I am so happy for her. Her departure would be such a huge loss for that company.

Why are some managers so unreasonable and have so little compassion for their staff? What is it about work that makes some managers want to work really long hours? Is it the money? Is it just that their lives are so broken outside that they sort of escape through hiding in their work? Do they realize how awful they are? Are their managers so awful that they’re just passing on the same quality of management down the line? I guess we work in a corrupt world where a lot of authority figures don’t honor God or live by Godly principles.

I am glad my manager isn’t really malicious or anything. He is actually a really nice guy. It’s just that work seems to be everything to him – he is 200% work – whereas normal people are 50% work and 50% life.

My Job ;-)

Message for Christie

Hey C, have a look at this. It's a blog created by a wonderful couple at Riverview for their home group. Isn't it such a great idea as a way of tracking what's going on in peoples' lives and what to pray for :-)

Our Amazing God

This is a lovely little extract I got out of a book called “Loving One Another”, by Gene A. Getz. That’s our amazing God he’s talking about.

“When Jesus changed the water into wine, it was the best wine, demonstrating He was the Master of quality.

When He healed the nobleman’s son, while the boy was more than 20 miles away, He showed He was the Master of distance or space.

When He instantaneously healed the impotent man who had been crippled for 38 years, He demonstrated that He was the Master of time.

Then, when He miraculously fed the 5,000 (besides women and children), He demonstrated He was the Master of quantity.

When He walked on the water, He demonstrated He was the Master of natural law.

When He healed the man who had been born blind, He demonstrated He was the Master over misfortune.

And finally, when He raised Lazarus from the dead, He demonstrated He was the Master over death.”

Melancholic vs Sanguine

Things have been tough at work lately. My boss has been working long hours and I can see it is affecting his health. He’s been coughing and blowing his nose a lot. He’s seemed so stressed and snappy and at times it has felt like he goes out of his way to look for imperfections in my work.

What’s worse is that because we have so much to achieve in a short amount of time, he wont let me take any annual leave until November.

I don’t know why but recently, we seem to have had a lot of little misunderstandings. Part of the problem is that he doesn’t explain things properly. One day he asked me to update our web site, so I did. As soon as he found out I had done this, he went ballistic because he had wanted to wait for a certain time to publish the new information – about 10 minutes after I had done so – and he had wanted all the attached documents to be named in a certain way and the links to open up in new windows. How could he expect me to know all that just by asking me to update the web site?

Then during a meeting we had on Thursday with the Commissioners, the Chief Justice asked me to put the late submissions we’d received, up on our web site, so I did. It was a simple process, I just needed to add the names of the people putting in the submissions and then add hyperlinks to the documents…. well that’s what I thought. It turns out my melancholic boss wanted to do the task himself (I think?), and for it to be done in a way that was different to how I had done it. With all the tension that’s developed between us over the last month or so, it was just one snap too many.

I went back to my office and all these tears just started pouring out of my eyes, silent tears. I was quickly wiping them away because I didn’t want him to know I was so upset. He just frustrates me so much sometimes because he’s so pedantic about everything and it all has to be done his way. I work so hard in this job, much harder than in any other job I have done before, and I do my tasks as well as I can and then I get these snippy comments thrown at me when I least expect them.

A little while later, thankfully after I had stopped the tears flowing, he comes into my office and says “I guess I didn’t really explain what I wanted” and then walks out. It didn’t make me feel any better.

I then headed downstairs for a cup of coffee in search for someone positive to cheer me up. Two of the guys brightened up my morning by telling me about their Contiki tours coming up. Lucky fellas. I was just so grateful for their cheerfulness. Then I dragged myself back upstairs to my office.

About an hour later, my boss knocks on my office door and says “can we talk?”. I was like “what about?” and he goes “I just want to talk about this morning and clear the air”. So I go and sit in his office and he starts to ramble on about how he knows he hasn’t been clearly expressing himself lately and that he has a tendency to focus on the negatives and not acknowledge my work (I told him that was true). He said he was dealing with these flaws in his personality (I was thinking “man, he actually read that book on personality types that I gave him!”). He said that he wanted to improve the communication between us and for me to tell him when I think he’s being unreasonable (I told him that was really hard to do when he was so snappy with me, and asked him if he minded me throwing something at him instead – that made us both smile a bit).

Anyway, I guess it changed things a bit. The whole time I had tears in my eyes. I realize it must have been hard for him to say all that, even though he didn’t actually say sorry. The word “sorry” is not in his vocabulary. Instead he just blamed it all on his personality type, which I thought was funny, though I certainly didn’t feel like laughing at the time. Things were still pretty tense all arvo right up til when I left work. Thank God that day ended.

My Puppy

This is my big baby, Marshall. In the left piccy, he's 7 months old, in the right piccy, he's 20 months old. Such a gorgeous little boy ;-)

Panel Beater

Last weekend I was taking mum to see the apartment I missed out on and I missed the turn-off so I had to turn into some place and turn the car around. As I was backing the car, I suddenly heard a familiar loud crunching noise….. it turns out that one of those sneaky inconspicuous vertically challenged pillars had thrashed itself into my car AGAIN. That’s the fifth time it has happened now. When I got out to assess the damage, I could see that the back was dented in the shape of the 20cm diameter cylindrical pillar. It looked pretty bad and mum was in shock, but I assured her it was nothing. I mean the lights weren’t broken and the back of my car is actually made of very malleable material which is easy to fix.

Over the last year, I feel I have become a bit of an expert at fixing my car, having had my fair share of experiences. So, before mum could freak out any longer, I pulled the back panel off the side of my car, used a hammer to push out the dents, then filled the 5cm x 1 cm hole with araldite glue and painted over it with! No one would ever guess I had just fixed a 20cm wide dent in my car. They could probably guess I have fixed up a couple of holes though because I made way too much glue and was too impatient to wipe away the excess glue, so it ran down the car and solidified, resulting in some strange looking silver blobs. I guess it adds character. I think I did a damn good job fixing my car.

It’s not just pillars that I can remove evidence of. Only a couple of months earlier, I was running late for a blading sesh with my friend Dee and I ran out the door, and reversed my car really fast into my sister’s awaiting ute. So frustrating…. why did she park her car right behind mine!?! Anyway, I spent about two hours hammering out the dents from both cars, then using Cut’n’Polish treatment to get her red paint off my silver car, and my silver paint off her red car, then I painted both cars with touch-up paint in their respective colours. Jules’ car required a bit more effort cos the bumper was clinging for its dear life to the car, in two pieces. I fixed the bumper by gluing it with craft glue from a glue gun and then reinforcing it with red electrical tape. Then I painted over the red tape with dark grey paint and it looked really good and it is STILL intact even today! …and better still, she has no idea what I did! ;-) She just thinks I gave her car a bit of a jazz up with some fresh paint. I’ll tell her when we get to heaven….. if it lasts that long!

Here’s a piccy of my car – the aqua arrow shows where you can rip the panel away from the car with your hands in order to get to the inside of the panel and hammer out the dents; the pink arrows show where I have filled in two holes, one with Liquid Nails, the other with Aruldite Glue; and the yellow arrow shows where there is a slight dent remaining. Pretty fine job if I do say so myself. It’s still a funky little car … or spaceship as someone called it ;-)

Old blog locked me out

Dunno what happened, but somehow I got locked out of my beloved blog and I have no idea how to get back in, so I've had to create a new one! Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr ... and the frustrating thing is, there doesn't seem to be any one to contact to help me. The blogger help page sends you around in circles to avoid enabling you to harrass anyone. Agggh well. Good thing I am clever and can just start afresh. The chickies told me the other night that I spelt "hawaiian" wrong in my last blog, so I've claimed the correct spelling now!